From The Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey

by Pascal Khoo Thwe

This text recounts the story of a young man's upbringing in a remote tribal village in Burma and his journey from his strife-torn country to the tranquil quads of Cambridge. In lyrical prose, Pascal Khoo-Thwe describes his childhood as a member of the Padaung Hill tribe, where ancestor worship and communion with spirits blended with the tribe's recent conversion to Christianity. In the 1930s, Pascal's grandfather captured an Italian Jesuit, mistaking him for a giant or a wild beast; the Jesuit in turn converted the tribe. (The Padaung are famous for their giraffe women - so-called because their necks are ritually elongated with ornamental copper rings. Pascal's grandmother had been exhibited in a touring circus in England as a freak). Pascal developed a love of the English language through listening to the BBC World Service, and it was while working as a waiter in Mandalay to pay for his studies that he met the Cambridge don John Casey, who was to prove his saviour.

320 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication January 1, 2049

Reviews

[Kelly Furniss]

* Myanmar/Burma-from cover
A member of a tiny, remote Burmese tribe famous for their 'giraffe-necked' women, student Pascal Khoo Thwe was forced to flee to the jungle during the rise of the corrupt military dictatorship. His lover had been arrested, raped and murdered by the armed forces, and Pascal became a guerrilla fighter. But a chance meeting with Dr. John Casey, a Cambridge Don visiting Mandalay, would change both their lives forever.
Overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles and danger, the two men strike up a scholarly correspondence that would take Pascal from the brutal hardships of guerrilla warfare to the hallowed world of Cambridge University. This is the moving true story of his extraordinary life and miraculous journey.

[Keri Kwan]

Hard to read. I expected it to be like a story, and instead it was more history heavy without a lot of personal touches. It was hard to know what was happening chronologically. And the writing style was very hard to follow along and I wasn’t pulled into the story.